Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Weeeeeeeeeee. So I’m back from a week off, to my outrage Chelios has posted a football game review, but he balanced it out by sharing my Civ V addiction and putting together a comprehensive list of what to expect from the Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer that I can’t afford to buy. While I was off I hit up the PSN store and grabbed me some demos, realised I was too late for Playstation Plus’ limited time offer of free Fallout 3 DLC (Nooooooooooooooooooo), realised no-one gives a shit about The Sims 3 Barnacle Bay DLC on PC and celebrated a 1st birthday. Good times.

On with the show.

I have a lot of time for platformers.

Designers of successful games must pull off the extraordinary feat of getting you to repeat the exact same moves for ten to forty to sixty plus hours without it numbing the mind like when I saw an 8 year old fall head first into the frozen vegetable section of Tesco.

Platformers are in principle an easy way of accomplishing this because you have a basic skill set; run, jump, shoot and can graft those moves onto any environment to keep the pace motoring along. However, it’s not as easy as all that as proven by any awful platformer you care to mention. For some reason I can only think of Jurassic Park right now, I think the Mega Drive version.

Good gameplay, that all encompassing handle of vaguery, is essential of course. Mario 64 has the bare essentials as well as the blueprint for every game of it’s ilk you’ve played in the last 15 years. Story is fast emerging as the new staple. It is almost on a par with compelling gameplay as a motivation for beating the next enemy, getting to that ledge, grabbing that next item. Though it is story that propels you forward it is ultimately how the game feels that pulls you on.

And (yes I think sometimes it is acceptable to start a sentence with “and”) so in a roundabout way we drop in on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, a game with the distinction of being co-written by screenwriter Alex Garland. While I think games should very much not try to be movies I have no problem with a professional screenwriter having a hand in dialogue. Games on the whole need an improvement in how the characters get over.

Also, there's a slinky redhead of course.

Having no money I must sate myself with the demo. A burly man lucks out of his pod on a flying prison barge. He chases a female escapee to an escape unit, through combat bots and a crumbling ship to be held against his will by the girl upon landing in a decayed future New York by use of a neural something, which puts the brain hurt on. So far, so fine. I’m perfectly happy for there to be a bit of mystery (why was the dude in prison (falsely or for rebelling against fascism I’ll wager) and why does the woman want to get to where she’s going and just how will their relationship ultimately develop (into a situation where they pork, I’ll wager)? And blah blah blah.

You can see where it’s going but the characters themselves actually seemed to have a little subtlety to them, overt and hammy but there nonetheless. Only time will tell if it turns out that way.

Gameplay then. It’s fine. It’s no Uncharted of course, but then what is? You leap from ledge to handhold and back again and fight almost exclusively in melee though there’s bound to be a ranged weapon later on. The camera gets right up front with the action and I didn’t once find it to screw around the way it so often can.

If I get some money I’ll buy Enslaved. If it costs up to thirty pounds, but chances are I’m effing skint for two months at least.

Dead Rising 2 – Review

With the risk of being relevant, I bring you my thoughts on Capcom’s Dead Rising 2.

Click below for good shiz…and zombies.

Skate 3 – A review

So here I am, reviewing a game that isn’t over a year old. Wonders never cease. In honor of reviewing a slightly relevant game I may try and be slightly professional in my review. It will most likely however still contain expletives such as fuck and vagina.

So click below and behold my insight into the world of Skate 3.

Motorstorm Apocalypse, Also in 3D

Part of Eurogamer Expo 2010

So those arcade racers I mentioned in the previous post? This is exactly what I mean, it’s a laugh a minute thrill ride that you dive into for short bursts. It’s fine and has its place but is it really worth 40 of your hard earned pounds? The only sound that escapes my lips when I try to answer that question is “euuuuuuuuuuuuuyyyyrrrrrrr”.

A couple years ago I bought Midnight Club: Los Angeles. It was good I suppose but after a while, you know. Euuuuuuuuuuuuuuuyyyyyyrrrrrr.

Visually it was great and the track took you all over the place with buildings collapsing on your head and whatnot, so the first playthrough will be fun. Subsequent plays will probably get 20% less fun each time.

3D

The vehicles looked pretty much the same as in 2D but they are not such a focus as they are in GT5. They handled the environments much better though. It doesn’t flicker when you’re at high speed, which is all the time, and just whips on by like you’d expect. Except for the gimmick of debris kicking toward the screen there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to it.

That said, the demo was from a pre-alpha build so it’s all to play for and people on the whole will enjoy it. There’s no reason not to, but also no reason to love it yet either.

Gran Turismo 5, also in 3D

Expectations are high. After more than 4 years in development Polyphony Digital need to produce the gaming equivalent of finger banging the audience to a post orgasmic climax. I like to think of it as a sexual finishing move.

But enough about your mum.

This pretty much needs to be a benchmark for quality. It wont be so great for a party time fun bash like you may think Burnout or Need for Speed is, but let’s be fair, it does have kart racing. What they’ve done with karts is let you know they don’t take themselves too seriously while still not making a popcorn racer, and keeping a game design pedigree.

It is painfully detailed and it pays off. All the little details that you perhaps cannot identify individually without some effort, collude to beam directly into your brain the feeling that you are watching something very realistic.

The lighting, the physics, the reflections, the dirt, the focus blur, the motion blur and the sound.

The sound.

I started off having accidentally chosen a manual gearbox. Now when I start off something like this, the most recent similar game being Forza 3, I like to get the feel of the cars and so put on an automatic gearbox to avoid having something else to think about. On a related side note the most annoying thing about a racing “simulator” is the propensity to completely misjudge your speed and turn into a corner only to oversteer dramatically going, in fact, in a completely straight line and crashing.

So I’m on the start line fully aware that I’m going to have to gear manually, also it’s a new game to get the hang of and I’m supposed to be paying attention so I can hack together some bullshit preview for my un-viewed blog.

Fucking love the R8

I hear the car rev and I nearly shit. I don’t care how prototypically blokey this makes me appear, how adolescently loutish but when I hear a big car engine roar it is heaven. Makes me feel ten years old again with models of Lamborghinis on my windowsill and pictures of Lotuses on the wall. From an intellectual standpoint it is the wonder of the progression of engineering genius that has led to the current range of motors. And personally I’ve almost come to accept the fact that I will probably never own a supercar, so this game is in all likelihood the closest I will ever get it.

So now all my points come together like a bukkakke money shot. (Four Ks in bukkakke, right?)

I’m off the line and I realise I would probably buy this game for the sounds alone. If the game has a soundtrack, and that soundtrack is racing noise I will not be disappointed. In fact I’ll probably play it in my car while I’m driving. Anyway, I clumsily start to get the feel of shifting the gears for which you must rely on engine noise and in the beginning, the briefest of glances at the rev counter. Oh shit there’s a corner so now where I’d usually hammer the breaks, try to gas through the turn and slide into the barrier what happens is I drop shift to a gear below where I need it out of panic pressing, slow right the hell down then advance a gear into the turn, my revs drop and I power out.

Turns out I should always have run a manual game, and you should too and I’ll tell you why. If you want just an arcade experience and that’s all you ever want then you can drive an automatic but to be fair, if that’s what you want there are a ton of other games you should be playing. If you want to be involved and get your teeth into this then play the manual setting from the start. It may be tougher at first but you will get better faster and more comprehensively.

When I was learning to play bass I decided to exclude using my little fingers because it was easier to just leave them out as they are naturally not as dextrous. This was a mistake because when it came time to play more complex licks I really needed to bring them in and re-learning to include them was a bitch. I still don’t use the pinkie of my plucking hand because it is ridiculously, disproportionately small but that’s another matter.

Please enjoy another screen to break up the article

So I’m riding pretty high throughout my lap. I’m taking corners better than I could have ever expected, the scenery is gorgeous, the car is absolutely pristine and the noises primal. The revs, the sound of the road, the bumps (you know, the red and white bits, what the hell are they called again……..?) everything just kind of marries up and satisfies you. Very impressive stuff.

3D

Right so exactly the same set up but in 3D. The 3D demos didn’t last a full lap even but I assume it plays the same.

The car was an image to behold. The way the glass and metal gleamed together with how the rear of the car was very discernibly closer than the back window showed how clear the 3D is. They obviously have put a lot of work into getting the dimensions of the vehicles just right. The environments move to fast to work in 3D though. It’s the same in even the best 3D movie. Quick scenes just don’t cut it, they appear choppy and jittery and it does not work. Which is a shame because the car in 3D looks near as perfect as  I can imagine.

So to summarize, you can keep your fancy third dimension, I’m happy to cream it on the sofa with my two thank you very much

inFamous 2

Part of Eurogamer Expo 2010

This was strange because inFamous 2 was stuck in an obscure corner of the expo with only two active TVs which were facing away from the show floor. So unless you approached because you were interested in PixelJunk Shooter then chances are you wouldn’t get to see this. When we rolled around to it about halfway through the day barely anyone was loitering. And what a shame because like the first, inFamous 2 is shaping up to be a gem.

You still play Cole only this time in a fictional New Orleans (N’Orleans) city and he is still smashing heads using his electrical powers.

 

See?

 

Aside from me being annoyed that they use the word “Vortexes” instead of “Vortices” it plays very well and is a natural extension of inFamous.

First there was a melee sequence where Cole uses his new amp stick to channel his powers into blunt force. The camera pulls right up to him and sticks you in the action, when you deliver the final blow it slows down a little and almost crash zooms. As it does this you are able to maintain your orientation in the space and also instinctively know where the next enemy is. You can switch instantly between melee targets with fluidity and all in all it’s very wholesome.

Next there was a chase where Cole must grind the power lines and use static thrusters to run down a limo. This is one of those games where as a sequel it is leaving the fundamentals of the original unchanged but also adding story and enough new mechanics to feel as if something new is going on. It’s like the second season of a great television show. If you wanted something totally different, you’d change channel and watch something else, but you do want new plotlines.

Slick gameplay.

SOCOM 4 with PS Move

Part of Eurogamer Expo 2010

 

So I plain forgot to get pictures of this, which is probably a blessing considering my camera skills.

SOCOM 4 seems like a fairly decent and involved third person shooter (Thirps?). You’re some kind of guy and you are required to shoot people and blow things up and so on. In a demo hall all that stuff is kind of by the by.

This was present on regular controlled PS3s but half of those were crashed out all day so I only got to play this on Move. It was both good and bad in this respect.

My only motion control shooter experience is Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and that was a damn fine experience. Pin-point accuracy the whole time, fluid and intuitive movements. It played exactly how you would want. PS Move has sub-millimeter accuracy so should be a blast too right? If I had ten minutes to dick around with the settings then yes, conceivably. I would eliminate the bounding box, the free movement zone your reticule has before it moves the viewable screen around, straight away. It moved too slowly horizontally compared to how it moved vertically so when you had to engage combatants on your plane and then shift to those above or below you, it was disorienting.

The targeting was very nice, it pointed exactly where I wanted and you can’t ask more than that. It’s better than auto-aim. The Move controller worked just fine and when a decent enough game can utilise it well I will be happy to buy one.

Make no mistake, I probably will not buy SOCOM 4 because I have better things to be getting on with than another shooter, but if I was given it I wouldn’t be sad about it.

Video from E3 of the section I demoed.

Killzone 3………..D

Part of Eurogamer Expo 2010

If only your eyes were able to process visual information in 3 dimensions, loser.

Killzone 3 impressed the hell out of me. This pre Alpha build was solid and completely stable the whole time I saw it, on top of that the 3D was absolutely pristine.

There were two pairs of 3D glasses per TV so spectators could view without thinking they had a concussion. I duly put them on and saw the blurriness clear up, but I was still seeing the double image. My job enables me to view 3D content on an almost daily basis so I’m no newbie to the scene. My eyes adjusted 20 seconds later and the image just came to me.

A nicely interpreted depth solution exists in Killzone 3. This is a noncey way of saying all the planes blend seamlessly together, and importantly the cross hair stays accurate and true across whichever depth it encounters.

These guys are in a war zone right now

Onto gameplay, I’ve declared my lack of passion for the FPS genre numerous times but here they just have it right. Bodies have weight, they don’t take too many or too few shots. Also, jetpack. I almost bought Dark Void purely on the strength that it had a jetpack in it. Here it is short burst and more of an extended jump tool, but you can use it to advance your position and take the strategic upper hand in a confrontation so it has incidental use, making it more than just a gimmick.

This was overall the best of the 3 3D games there.

Battlefield Bad company 2 gameplay vid

Watch this. Please. You owe it to yourself and your children and your childrens children and so on until the planet dies.

Update I don’t think the vid is embeding properly so click ->http://tinyurl.com/2a29t24 and it’ll take you there.

I know this is more work, but again, think of the children and your childrens children and so on.

Modnation Racers Video Review

That’s right ladies and gents. While the Prof is fapping one out over Demon Souls I bring you my belated thoughts on Modnation Racers…..in video form. Oooohhh indeed.
Check out the video and if you’re on of these youtubers head on over to our page and subscribe.